The Chris De Burgh Mystery

In 2000, a crazy rumour was swirling around London’s private members’ clubs for weeks. Noel Gallagher and Meg Mathews weren’t exactly media-shy, yet their new baby daughter hadn’t been seen anywhere. The idea they were being responsible parents was never seriously considered so, instead, from the Groucho to Soho House, the vacuum was filled with gossip.

The reason we never saw Anais in the press, the rumour went, was because she wasn’t Noel’s. She was someone else’s. We even had commemorative T-shirts printed up to celebrate the rumour’s mad punchline: “Goldie Is My Dad”.

Anyhow, for the last few weeks, a similar rumour has been swirling around Westminster. Lobby journalists were starting to whisper a little too loudly about how strange it was that there’d been no sign of any baby at Number 10 – and someone was obviously rattled enough to hastily stage an awkward photoshoot of Carrie, Boris and baby all together. But the decision not to show the baby’s face in it has only heaped more fuel on the fire of one particular conspiracy theory.

Maybe we need to bring out another T-shirt? “Zac Goldsmith Is My Dad”.

The big story in publishing this week was that of Mark Dawson, the author stripped of his Sunday Times Bestseller status after he let slip he’d bought 400 copies of his own book to nudge his way into the top ten.

It’s funny, but this sort of hustle has been standard in the music industry for decades. In Boyzone’s heyday, there was a point where Ronan and co started getting a little cocky and began talking about ditching Louis Walsh, telling him they had so many fans they didn’t need his help any more.

So Louis marched the boys out to his car and popped open the boot. Inside were hundreds of copies of their latest single.

“There you are, boys,” said Louis, “Here are your ‘fans’.”

While most footballers have behaved pretty well during lockdown, which club should have been paying special attention to their manager? Choosing to spend his time at a shagpad rather than the family home, neighbours were amused by all the female comings and goings…

Apparently Amber Heard and Johnny Depp aren’t the only Hollywood couple plagued by unidentified mystery poos appearing in the most unexpected places.

Someone who once took a meeting at Helena Bonham Carter’s house many years ago remembers asking to use toilet and being greeted in the bathroom by a rather heady stench. The toilet bowl was clean and empty – so the source of it must have been the solitary turd they saw sat in the bathtub.

It’s German house music maestro Timo Maas’s birthday on Monday but, with global DJ opportunities in short supply at the minute, sadly he may not be able to celebrate in quite the manner he might have liked.

He once overshared to an interviewer that he liked to have a wank on every translatlantic flight he ever took.

L writes:
“Since you’re exploring quirky foreign words, here is one for our times. With the Dutch last weekend holding up a massive European pandemic recovery fund, their reputation for being miserly resurfaced. This may be a stereotype, but it’s one the frugal Dutch themselves seem to embrace, as the word ‘krentenkakker’ suggests. This literally means ‘currant shitter’ and is applied to anyone so tight-arsed that they cack currants.”

FYI: In German, ‘korinthenkacker’ is a person obsessed with trivial details. It translates as ‘raisin/currant shitter’ too.

As Britain plods along in a strange state of semi-lockdown, with no real clarity or obvious end-point, we’re continuing to run our limited edition daily issues to help brighten up these batshit days.

Between now and our 1,000th weekly issue in August, we’re using the daily edition to revisit some of our favourite stories from the last 20 years of Popbitch – a year a day from 2000 on.

If you want to join in with it, you can sign up here and enjoy a little shot of gossip every afternoon from Monday-Friday while we wait for the pandemic to pass.

[Sign up/catch up here]

In Tuesday’s daily, we reopened the cold-case mystery of who vandalised Chris de Burgh’s page in the Newcastle Tele-West Arena guestbook in 2001. Someone took great care to mimic his handwriting to add the words “I am gay” under the message he wrote in it, and the only other acts to have played in between times were 5ive, The Corrs, Bjorn Again and the Beautiful South.

So who was it? One reader has a theory:

MB writes:
“My money is on the Beautiful South. When they were threatened with legal action by Jazzie B over a lyric in their song ‘My Book’ they were advised to settle out of court. Jazzie B’s publishers sent over a raft of legal papers for Paul Heaton and Dave Rotheray to sign.

“Feeling aggrieved and wanting to make things as difficult as possible for Jazzie B’s people, Heaton and Rotheray not only signed the requested bits, but next to every reference to ‘Trevor Beresford Romeo, professionally known as Jazzie B’ they wrote ‘CUNT’ in very large letters, assuming this would render the documents useless.

“They were very disappointed when Jazzie B’s people got in touch to thank them for their co-operation and assuring them that everything was now cool at their end.”

R writes:
“In the mid-2000s Terry Christian had a very short-lived TV show called Turn On Terry, filmed in a local city centre nightclub in Manchester. Staff there had to go out flyering to get a stock audience to stand around looking interested while he interviewed various semi-celebs.

“However, flyering for people to be in the audience for a Terry Christian TV vehicle turned out to be harder than expected. In the end, the only thing that worked was to say ‘Do you want to heckle Terry Christian? He’s filming here and needs an audience.’

“Even that didn’t get many in.”

How to cheat the bestseller list
[Read on The Critic]

Texas has its first drive-thru strip club
[Horniness: the mother of invention]

Crap jokes on stock images
[PunHub]

A brilliant story about the crazy NBA Disney World bubble
[Read in Vanity Fair]

Footage of Mars in 4K
[See on YouTube]

Want a goat to appear on your Zoom?
[Why not try Brett?]

Animated visual graphic of America’s most searched Google terms every day in the last decade
[Watch on YouTube]

That study this week that ‘proved’ bisexual men exist? It was published in the science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…
[…or, as it’s better known, ‘PNAS’]